In Brief

We’ve all come across prescriptive “always do this on X” advice online. A rule or secret which will always improve your tracks. People with experience will know that there are no ‘one size fits all’ solutions but underneath the ‘do it like this, don’t worry about why’ answers out there there is usually a general principle which, if correctly applied has value. The idea of these Start Here articles is to examine and highlight these general principles.

Going Deeper

The first distinction has to be are you dealing with real drums or a VI or sample? We’re going to be concentrating on real drums in this article. Samples tend to be pre-processed and ready to go but if you are going to be recording the drums they will need more work. You can save a lot of work later by spending just a little time on preparation.

The standard advice, which is perfectly true, is that the correct choice of drum, with new heads, properly tuned and appropriate to the song is important. However, I know that most of the recordings I’ve made of drum kits have involved a choice of one kick drum, with the heads which are already on it. Checking tuning is helpful as long as you or the drummer can tune drums well - lots of drummers I’ve met aren’t all that confident about tuning their kits.

Damping

Something which is very easy to check and change is damping, exactly how much you want to damp will depend on the song but it’s easy to adjust and there’s always something you can improvise with if you need extra damping. The important thing to have an idea about at this stage is what kind of kick drum sound will best fit the song. Tight and dry? Big and natural? Scooped and clicky? Whatever it is check the drummer’s technique as some drummers ‘bury their foot’, meaning they hold the beater against the head between hits. This will affect the drum’s decay.

Microphones

Turning attention to mic choice and placement. For a drum which is specifically designed to create bass, it’s amazing how easy to is to capture hardly any bass when miking up a kick. A poorly placed kick mic can sound more like someone bouncing a basketball than a big, pleasing ‘woomph’. It’s crucial to check the sound by recording some kick and playing it back. If you check on headphones or monitors while the drums are being played it’s easy to think that the bass you’re hearing acoustically from the drum is from the mic, even through a wall in a home studio.

Position depends on whether you are using one or two mics. Inside the drum pointing at the beater will capture the beater click and if placed well can give a full tone but it’s easy to get the aforementioned ‘basketball tone’ so check. I usually place off-centre if I’m using this position but I often don’t use an ‘in’ mic at all. There are no rules.

‘Out’ mics covering the outer head can be helpful for capturing tone but if not placed with care they can capture more spill than drum. This is why some engineers build tunnels of blankets off the front of kits. And of course if you are using more than one mic it’s important to check polarity between these mics. Most importantly know what sound you want. If you want a good starting point kick drum sound, the default Live Sound position of something a few inches off the hole in the front head will give you lots of bottom end with a soft-ish attack which can work well in lots of contexts. There are ways to get more carefully sculpted sounds but if you’re in a hurry, start there. Hear the difference between the in and out positions in the examples below, it’s a quirky part but the difference is really clear:

As for mic choice, lots of specialist kick drum mics exist. Many of these are excellent and the good thing about kick mics is that, unlike studio condensers, even the best aren’t very expensive. Many have a contoured response, pre-tuned to capture lots of bottom end and suitable upper midrange peak for added attack. Mics like the AKG D112 and Audix D6 are popular. For agressive attack the Shure Beta 91 is a bit more specialist, a flat condenser which is placed inside the drum. I often use a Sennheiser MD 421 or an old Audio Technica ATM25. The mic choice is important but not as important as reading around the subject might lead you to believe. A good mic in the wrong place will never work. However be wary of very cheap kick mics as some I’ve tried have sounded unpleasantly boxy.

Everyone Can Record Drums

If you’re ‘under-resourced’ when it comes to mics you can get a useable drum sound with just two mics. Even the hobbyist with a 2 channel interface can track drums. Most people have a condenser mic for vocals and if you have literally any other mic you can get some drums down. Use the condenser as a mono overhead, straight above the snare. The other mic, very often a cheap dynamic which you might not choose to use for its sound, can be put in the kick and you can use that to generate triggers from a sampler or drum VI. You can even sample the kick you have with the condenser. I’ve done it, it works.

Processing

When it comes to processing you’ll probably have seen ‘rules’ about cutting 300Hz or boosting 4KHz on kick drums. You certainly don’t have to do this but they do illustrate a principle that kick drums often get muddy or boxy, so pay attention to the lower midrange, and if you need some extra attack, one way of getting it is by boosting the upper mids but these are areas to notice, not necessarily change. Particularly because many kick mics are voiced to address these areas already. It might be a case of bringing up rather than cutting the low mids because your voiced mic already sounds scooped.

More Bass

If you feel that your kick lacks the bottom end you had hoped for just pulling up the bass using an EQ won’t necessarily help. You can’t boost what isn’t there and if that subby stuff you want wasn’t produced by the drum you recorded, no amount of boosting is going to help. Before you consider using a sample or a VI, consider adding some synthesised sub. There’s an old trick using a signal generator and a side-chained gate which is a great lesson in external keying but the results can be a bit ‘one note bass’. Metric Halo’s wonderful free plugin MH Thump gives more convincing results. Just be careful not to overdo it!

One thing that often gets overlooked is the use of high pass filters on kicks. Kicks should be bassy. But sometimes there is stuff down there which shouldn’t be there. I sometimes work with a drummer who buries his foot and often bounces his foot in the pedal with the beater pressed against the head. This is bad technique but he’s a great drummer! This bouncing causes a very low frequency pumping past the mic. Easily dealt with with a very low, very steep HPF. While you might not often high pass a kick, sometimes it’s important. There are no rules!

Once you have the requisite amount of low end dialled in with appropriate attention paid to the low mids you might feel you need extra attack. This can be dialled in using EQ in the high mids but shaping the sound can also be done using a compressor or, often more successfully these days, a transient designer. Depending on the player you might feel an appropriate amount of levelling is necessary. If you’re unsure how best to set up a compressor to achieve this there are amazingly effective tools which can help here, Sound Radix’s Drum Leveler comes highly recommended.

Gating

One processor which can be very useful on kicks is a gate. Using an expander/gate to push down the level of spill between hits can tidy things up very effectively. The trick here is to use the gate’s range control to only push the spill down a few dB. As little as 12 can be enough. This avoids the distracting sound of the gate opening and closing but still reduces it enough to be effective. The second way a gate can be helpful on a kick is to introduce some click back into a too-soft kick drum. By gating aggressively with a fast attack and high threshold you can create a suitable ‘click’ to the front of the sound, something live sound engineers have been doing for decades. The fact that kick live at the bottom end of the spectrum means that it is relatively easy to gate if you use the side chain filters to filter out the spill. The easiest option of all, and my preference is to use Sonnox’s DrumGate plugin which uses AI to identify different drum types. It’s easy but its also better!

Reverb

Lastly, don’t pay any attention to any rule you might have heard about not using reverb on kick drum. It’s true that its a good idea to keep low stuff out of the reverb because it can muddy things up but a live drum sound with reverb and a bone-dry kick doesn’t gel. Dial in a little reverb on the kick and you’ll probably find it sits better. On the subject of the sound gelling, keep in mind that an important part of the kick drum sound comes from the overheads so remember to work in context with the rest of the kit. Think about whether you like what is coming from the overheads and decide how and whether to high pass them accordingly.

Know What You Want And How To Get it

When you get into the details there’s a lot to consider about kicks but the most important thing is to know what you want. Drum replacement tools are so effective these days that some people go straight there even when working with live drums. The results sound great but I think that working with raw drum recordings, preferably ones you’ve made yourself, is the most fun you can have in the studio. Why wouldn’t you want to do that?

Photo by Jason Pofahl on Unsplash